Attempting to do the impossible with the improbable ... Helen Baxendale, Aden Gillett and Emma Cunniffe in Amongst Friends. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Who needs enemies when you have friends like Richard and Lara, an unlovely duo of an ex-MP-turned-crime-writer and a tabloid columnist, who live in a gated community in Peckham. Lara spews out her opinions about the world in print from her glass tower, but is too scared to step outside her compound gates; smoothie Richard is confident of being reselected to a safe seat.

Set a play in a closed environment and before the end of scene one, the outside world will invade. So it proves in April de Angelis's preposterous comedy that comes with shades of JB Priestley and such an overload of creakiness that for all its references to bankers and politicians, you would have thought it was written early last century rather than last week. The past takes up residence in the form of invited dinner guests, Caitlin and Joe, former neighbours who Lara and Richard discarded on their upwardly mobile climb. Next through the door is the all-too-vivid present: Shelley, the drug addict from the local estate, who is not just delivering dinner, but also home truths.

With Helen Baxendale playing Lara and Aiden Gillett as Richard, this is all-star casting, but it's an evening of watching fine actors attempting to do the impossible with the improbable. There are brittle one-liners but little sign of hidden depths in a plodding production that opts for kitchen-chic realism rather than something more surreal and edgy.